Fatted Guernsey Calves for Everyone!

My Dear Professor J,

Welcome back! Now where did I put that fatted calf... The return of the prodigal is always a cause for celebration and I'm sure no one is more pleased than our readers after a constant dose of me and my scrivener ways for so long. I have no doubt that they would agree with me when I say I hope you do not keep us waiting long for the return of your windbaggery. :)

Now my good man, although I understand your point, a modern man really can't complain to a modern woman about being compared to a carefully crafted image (saving the REAL discussion on that topic for the near future). Though what we are compared to is more likely to be visual than literary and often crafted literally. But along that line I would say that while I would want Juliet as well as the entertaining Guernsey women for friends I would want to be like Elizabeth; courageous and kind, thoughtful, smart, and subversive and rebellious when life calls for it. Brave.  But isn't that one of the things wonderful well written fictional characters can do--give us something to aspire to? Biographies can have the same effect, though often embellished and exaggerated. They can help us believe that our best is possible even when hope is dim. Wouldn't we all want to behave heroically when destiny calls for it?

All that being said, I will agree with you completely that women (especially the devotees of those formulaic romance novels) create in their imaginations the ideal man and then are disappointed by what reality has to offer. Isn't it great that men never do that? lol

Interesting to me that you thought the authors made a mistake with Mark's speech. Given his overall attitude, when I read that I felt he was mocking her and it made me cringe along with the rest of the letter in which his real character (or lack of it) is hinted at. Of course, we see it fully when he arrives on the island and wasn't "the least bit interested" in anything Juliet had been working on, and didn't ask any questions about it and then in the final straw assumes the worst of those who had been caring for Kit. Flowers seemed the one weapon in his wooing arsenal and he seemed to think a lack of patience and kindness could be made up for by roses and lilies. I felt the real flaw where he was concerned was that he was interested in Juliet at all, I thought him much more the trophy wife type. Donald Trump with an oily mustache. :)

For all the fun that the book is infused with, I'll admit to crying over the pregnant young woman frozen to the floor of her cell in the concentration camp--a haunting visual.

I loved some of the disguised bits of wisdom and understanding lurking about on the pages of this book:

Juliet knows that children are gruesome.  Did you know that Beatrix Potter and her brother use to collect dead animals and boil them so they could extract the skeletons and study them? It is one of the reasons her illustrations were  so charmingly life like.

She also lets us know if you really want to know people you should do what she did at Dawsey's and take "the opportunity to snoop through his books." One must have books; of course not having them tells us something too.

When Remy touches Juliet's shoulder on the beach and Juliet wrote that she felt she'd been given a gift. "...even such a tiny gesture as a touch takes trust."

When writing to Sidney about how she and Dawsey could have gone on forever longing for one another and pretending not to notice she writes, " This obsession with dignity can ruin your life if you let it."

What did you think about the Oscar Wilde letters? While the story of them was an interesting one, I thought it almost too neatly wrapped up the book.

More to say but I have to wash up. This slaying thing is really messy. ;)